This application relates generally to wireless communication and specifically to software for mobile communication devices.
There is a continually increasing number of mobile communication devices in use today, such as mobile telephones, PDAs with wireless communication capabilities, and two-way pagers. Software applications which run on these mobile communication devices increase their utility. For example, a mobile phone may include an application which retrieves the weather for a range of cities, or a PDA may include an application that allows a user to shop for groceries. These software applications take advantage of the mobility of these devices and connectivity to a wireless network in order to provide timely and useful services to users, regardless of where the users are. However, due to the restricted resources of mobile communications devices, such as memory, and the complexity of delivering data wirelessly to a mobile communication device, developing applications for mobile communications devices remains a difficult and time-consuming task.
Currently, mobile communication devices are configured to communicate with Web Services through Internet based Browsers and/or native applications. Browsers have the advantage of being adaptable to operate on a cross-platform basis for a variety of different devices, but have a disadvantage of requesting pages (screen definitions in HTML) from the Web Service, which hinders the persistence of data contained in the screens. A further disadvantage of Browsers is that the screens are rendered at runtime, which can be resource intensive. Native applications have the advantage of being developed specifically for the type of mobile device, thereby providing a relatively optimized application program for each runtime environment. However, native applications have disadvantages of not being platform independent, thereby necessitating the development of multiple versions of the same application, as well as being relatively large in size, thereby taxing the memory resources of the mobile device. There is a need for application programs that can be run on web service clients having a wide variety of runtime environments, as well as having a reduced consumption of mobile device resources.
The systems and methods as disclosed herein provide a component based application environment to obviate or mitigate at least some of the above presented disadvantages.